brainwave-generator

I've always said that one day the fire service will find a body on the stairs of an office block, burnt to a crisp, with the remains of a charred blackberry in hand. The post mortem will result a time of death of 16:04 and it'll turn out that at 16:03 the victim will have tweeted a photo of their office on fire, saying "office on fire now. maybe time to leave? #scared #hot #officefire"

Are you serious? You're saying you can't dry hire stuff anymore because people might get hurt? Sorry Kerry but that's absurd. You can't protect against accidents by not hiring stuff out. What about plant machinery, should that only be available on purchase and not on hire because only the owner knows how to use it? I'm not sure festivals are going to be very happy about having to buy their Telehandlers for 2 weeks use. Rigging hire companies.... should they stop hiring truss and motors too? Just because something is available on dry hire it doesn't mean it's automatically going to get picked up by a bunch of idiots and put up backwards. You just need to ensure that you stipulate it is only for use by competent people. There are a lot of people out there perfectly capable of installing stage and rigging products to a high standard, who simply don't have the capital to buy them. You can dry hire pneumatic drills. You can dry hire 200kVA generators. You can dry hire hot air paint-strippers. You can dry hire tractors with hedge trimmers bolted to the front. You can dry hire 5 ton chain hoists. You can dry hire wood chippers. You can't stop people dry hiring stuff just because idiots might use it. It's the idiots fault for using it wrong, not yours for hiring it to them, providing you make it clear to them that they should not use it unless they are competent in doing so. Things in this business would be a lot harder if you had to own everything you use. And many decent companies in this industry would suffer if dry hire of their products wasn't permitted.

The problem is that when you speculate "why" you inherently, with or without intent, speculate "who", since everything that could go wrong is somebody's responsibility. So whatever went wrong, it was the person with the responsibility who you're pointing a finger at. Whether you mention them or not, you are. That is what I was trying to get at. There is nothing anyone can do from the comfort of their arm chair and internet connection to look at the stage and suggest why it fell down. It's a tangled pile of metal at the moment. And that tangled pile of metal will be stripped apart and loaded onto trucks, meaning you'll never see the depths of it. Thus, the only people who will be able to input any kind of meaningful info on how it happened, are the engineers working on it.

My posts seem to have been taken entirely the wrong way. I am not trying at all to suggest a blackout on rigging related topics, or suggest that it's a taboo topic. I really just think it's unfair to feature any kind of "it looks like X happened" or "I don't think Y was suitable" from people who evidently have very little background on which to make such damning statements. The danger is mainly that after 5 pages of discussing how, for example, the structure was overloaded; everyone starts to believe it. And it moves away from hypothetical discussion, maybe not for all, but certainly for some; and particularly newcomers to the thread can often come under the immediate assumption that the structure was indeed overloaded. Once that becomes a 'fact', you are immediately thus accusing the riggers of not performing their job properly. The house rigger should have known the roof capacity, didn't adhere to it, and somebody died. So by inferring that overload was the failure, you are indirectly inferring that the house rigger has blood on his hands. And then that becomes 'fact' too. And it's utterly unfair for anybody that widespread belief is that they are responsible for the death of somebody else, especially when it may later conspire that they are not. Good reputations can take years to build and seconds to destroy. And in the freelancing industry, it is upon your reputation that you pay the rent, and put food in your mouth. It is not at all fair to jeopardise anybody's reputation until solid facts have been established. I am more than happy to discuss the nature of scaffold roofs, I am more than happy to discuss show stop procedures, I do not want it to become a taboo topic. I just strongly feel that any direct references to this tragic accident and speculation as to what caused it should be avoided for the time being, for the sake of respecting those involved until a formal investigation identifies who is at fault.

I had met the guy so did not comment lack of brainwave is just a troll I am not trolling. I am quite serious that it is not fair to appoint blame or finger point until the facts have been established by the formal investigation. Nothing can be learned until it is made certain what went wrong. So the most respectful thing this internet community can do is shut up and listen until the facts are established. Please take your 'trolling' comments elsewhere. I am completely serious when I say that speculative comments when talking about the death of crew in a stage collapse is unfair, especially on those who may wrongly have the finger pointed at them in their complete innocence. I have no time for that.

Does it? Can you share this information, there only seems to be news thus far of a stage collapse and not what caused it.

So what should we do? Censor all discussions of stage collapses because it's a topic that makes some people uncomfortable? Perhaps we should ban all discussion of rigging or power in case someone gets an idea into their heads and produces a dangerous installation? No, that would be ridiculous. As Kerry has said above, these threads may come to the attention of production managers and put to the front of their minds the safety issues involved in running an event, which can only be a good thing. What we're trying to promote generally is a culture of safety across the industry (and many other industries), and the only way to achieve that is by talking about safety. The safety of an event isn't just down to the riggers. Everyone has a role to play, however big or small, so anything we can do to raise their awareness of safety the better. You may have rigged a perfectly appropriate stage, but then if the lighting and sound teams turn up with a different set of kit that weighs more, what do you do? Lets say the line array is changed last minute for one that weighs 20% more, but this information never makes it beyond the sound lot, who think it won't matter. Meanwhile, the lighting team bring a few extra movers, and all the movers weigh a bit more than expected because they're a magnetic ballasted lot cross-hired from another company, and no-one on site is even aware that it's happened. At the same time, the video wall manufacturer's data sheet contains an error in the wind loading factors to be applied. Who's now to blame that the structure's overloaded and potentially unsafe? None of the mistakes were made by riggers, they were made by people who wouldn't normally consider rigging safety, and that's the issue. You may know exactly how dangerous temporary structures can be, but does everyone else? And pointing fingers on the internet solves that? Raising safety awareness cannot be achieved efficiently by an internet forum pointing fingers from an uneducated, under-informed standpoint. (Uneducated and under-informed in the specific incident, that is). You can't form a sensible discussion you know nothing about. It will not achieve anything. It's simply unfair on the people you're accusing of not fulfilling their job description. There is no need to stop discussion about rigging. There is simply a need to stop under-informed, ill-educated and ultimately needless finger pointing sessions in the wake of tragic accidents. Just leave it. Talk about something else. Let the professionals deal with it, come to their own well-educated, well-informed decisions, publish a report, and then you can discuss the report to death. I think trying to suggest that crew involved in the hanging of heavy loads are ignorant to structural suitability is also ridiculous, and to suggest that an internet discussion about it would change their ways, even moreso. Every PA company I've ever installed points for has been thorough in which boxes they are hanging, how much they weigh, right down to the weight of the fly frames and any additional flying hardware. I do appreciate the point you are trying to make, but I think you are under-estimating the standard of people involved in such events. Hanging any load, particularly above the heads of people (public, performers or crew) is not taken lightly by anybody. When these accidents do occur, the cause can be complex and composed of numerous individual causes which in isolation may not be enough to cause the incident in question. The cause may also be something that was not immediately thought of. I can think of an incident where the loading dock of a stage collapsed and injured several people, the armchair experts were screaming blue murder about the stage not being fit for purpose and the stage crew not taking their job seriously and all the normal stuff, the actual reason it occurred was because a truck driver engaged the wrong gear and reversed 50 tons of lorry into it and knocked it over. Nothing structurally wrong with it, it was never designed to have a 50 ton lorry driven into it.

Just because you work underneath stage roofs it doesn't give you the right to speculate who's to blame when one collapses. Discussing it on here is not going to change the amount of risk you come under. You're not going to find stage riggers who couldn't care less who then change their ways and become super-considerate because they read about it on the flaming internet. Believe me when I say that working above peoples heads with heavy steelwork puts home how much responsibility we have far more strongly than reading it on the web.

Completely agree and it's something I always say. There is no place for speculating about what caused peoples deaths when you have no idea. There are very few, if any, people on the Blue Room who actually have the technical knowledge and experience of working with temporary structures, to be able to simply look at a photo and say "that looks like a failure of such and such". The theory displayed here (and elsewhere on the internet) that "it wasn't caused by bad weather so it must have been overloaded" is ridiculous. To suggest that a stage could only collapse by means of weather of overloading is absurd and displays a thorough lack of understanding. Somebody died here. He was somebody's child. And may have been somebody's parent too. And speculating over weather they were killed by a lack of competence or by a true accident is not appropriate. Think about how you would feel if your child / parent was killed in a car crash and an internet car forum started speculating about whether they were drinking or on drugs? When actually they may have just slipped on ice? There is no place for it, there are no lessons to be learned from armchair expert speculation. As has been said, a team of engineers will write a thorough report in due course and you can read that until the cows come home. Remember Indiana? All the internet experts said it was an insufficient structure with insufficient ballast. The engineers verdict was that those things played a part but were by no means the limits.